A strong conviction that something must be done is the parent of many bad measures

[By Nic Lindh on Sunday, 08 May 2005]

Mark ’em down

I’m sitting here absolutely kicking myself for all the HTML I’ve written over the years without the benefit of John Gruber’s utterly useful Markdown.

Markdown is one of those technologies I’ve been aware of at some level for years, but in order to use it on Movable Type I would have had to download a plugin. Inertia and laziness being what it is, somehow never got around to doing it.

Typo has Markdown support built in, so why not go ahead and give it a shot, right? And it’s freaking brilliant, taking most of the tedium and ugliness of raw HTML right out of the writing process.

Even though it’s not that big of a deal to write HTML manually, you still context-switch from English writing mode to HTML monkey mode, which adds to the mental overhead.

(Handily enough, this finally provides me with the excuse for the crappy content of this blog I’ve been looking for. “It was the context-switching, see? It’s not my fault.”)

If you do any amount of writing for the web, do yourself a favor and evaluate Markdown. It may not fit you, but it’s definitely worth the few minutes it takes to get the basics down.